Saving Your Wine Cellar from the Plebs

Isn't it astonishing to see the lengths rich people go to to keep their wine away from the masses?

I remember reports of a tasting seminar being held at a high-altitude resort in France, I believe, to research the effect of said meters above sea level on the taste of wine. Unsurprisingly, I can't find the results via Google – the outcome was probably insignificant, both actually and statistically. I also I feel that such statements – "boffins gather in Verbier to study effect of altitude on fine wine", for example (note, they never test it on Yellow Tail or Barefoot) – should come with subtitles: rich guys want to see if drinking their high end wine in the relative security of a private chalet in the Alps can be scientifically validated.

You might think I'm getting all bolshie again – as I am wont to do, I admit – and you'd be correct. This morning I read about a group of ultra-rich individuals who are paying to have 12 bottles of fine wine sent to the international space station for a year to see what effect being in a weightless environment, surrounded by advanced technology – as far away from the poorest person as it is possible to get – will do to the taste of your common-or-garden, yet exclusively grown, sold and made grape anthocyanin. But don't let me cramp your style – you can subtitle the project however you want: "Vital leap in research on the aging of exclusive Napa Cabernet" could be one angle, "scientists suggest sending your Saint-Émilion to space" another.

Shoot it into space, bury it, sink it in the sea, put it up a mountain, (and if the rumours are to be believed David and Victoria Beckham have tried putting it somewhere considerably closer to home); you have to marvel at the lengths people go to to keep decent wine out of the hands of the great unwashed. The bonus of the space-station story is the added value those bottles will gain on their return to earth. If you're not considering the effect shooting a case of wine into orbit is going to have on their resale value at Christie's or Sotheby's then frankly, sweetie, you're hanging about in the wrong circles. You need to get that negativity out of your life. You need to start aiming much, much higher. Because you can bet your miserable, Bourgogne Aligoté ass that the dudes sending their wine into space are already thinking about the wording of the entry in the auction catalogue. Maybe Coravin will make a limited-edition unit in the form of a Face Hugger for the pre-sale sampling.

But seriously, if you ever wonder what doomsday prepping looks like for a bitcoin entrepreneur, it's a bunker in New Zealand, a cellar in a satellite and a life-pass to the ski lifts of St Moritz. I understand that most of us could deal with the End of Rule of Law as long as the claret was voluminous, well stashed, and one had access to a corkscrew; I understand that the wealthy are a perennial subject for us, from Jane Austen to supermarket till magazines; but really, what public service is it to send wine into space on the whim of a bunch of billionaires?

Why are we taking this seriously? Even if you admit that it might be of use to know that one can safely take one's boxes of Grand Cru Burg in the shuttle as we leave the fireball that is earth with wine writers debating whether Touriga Nacional really is better on the Pomerol plateau than Marselan, what's the betting you'll be on the spaceship in the first place? Furthermore, the odds of you being on a shuttle leaving earth are better than owning a case of fine Burgundy at the moment, right? (The jokes write themselves.)

I really believe that a fair chunk of the interest in natural wine, or the fashionable nature of Beaujolais or South Africa, is a direct consequence of the void left behind by so-called "fine wine" being priced out of reach by the people now trying to send it into space. If you're interested in flavor and complexity and integrity where is there left to go if you want to go further than your supermarket shelf ?

The space story is just an illustration of how a branch of wine – a delicious, yet crazily priced, exclusively presented branch – is slipping away from most of us, both metaphorically and physically.